STASI: Your phone knows Trump ruined Thanksgiving — and he didn’t even have to do anything

By Linda Stasi

|NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Nov 24, 2017 | 1:17 PM

Donald Trump wrecked your Thanksgiving. No matter how good a time you think you had, rest assured you were miserable.

Forget so many movies about family dysfunction have taken place on Thanksgiving since the 1970s. Forget even that Woody Allen made a cottage industry out of Thanksgiving family misery.

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Nope, it's the Trump family's destructive dysfunction that's to blame for our family Thanksgiving dinner dysfunction say two university researchers, who used the data from a creepy company that tracks all of us all of the time.

Apparently the President and political discussions made us (practically forced us, they determined) to spend less time at Thanksgiving family dinner than we normally would — 20-30 minutes less at dinner in 2016 than we in 2015.

These egghead turkeys used data from the inappropriately named company, SafeGraph, which tracks all of us all of the time, to determine our movements on Thanksgiving.

Eew.

The political divide caused by Donald Trump practically forced us to spend less time at Thanksgiving dinner last year, according to a company called SafeGraph. (JIM BOURG/REUTERS)

Knowing that some company was tracking whether I hung around for pie is enough in and of itself to ruin Thanksgiving, but no, they say, it was Donald who wrecked the whole thing.

My Thanksgiving was great but had I known we were being tracked for the time spent at dinner, for sure it would have been ruined. Dear God, do they know how much weight I gained because I did hang around for pie?

The researchers used the SafeGraph data to track how long folks traveling from Republican to Democratic areas and Dem to GOP areas spent at dinner, and figured out that politically divided families spent less time together because of Trump. How much time was lost? According to Politico, we lost "27 million person-hours of cross-partisan Thanksgiving discourse." What?

And here I thought Americans spent less time at dinner because of greed. Who knew that pre-Black Friday Thanksgiving Day sales weren't what lured us out early from dinner? Who knew that Thanksgiving wasn't ruined because we were too busy getting trampled, shot and crushed at malls that opened early on Thanksgiving instead relaxing and falling asleep watching football after dinner?

Who knew it was all Donald Trump's fault because, using data collected from — yes — 17 trillion location markers on 10 million smartphones, we left Thanksgiving early because our relatives voted for the other side.

The Turkey may have tasted great, but it was subtly spoiled thanks to Trump. (evgenyb/Getty Images/iStockphoto)

On a more human level, a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that more than a third of Americans dreaded the dinner because they dreaded political conversations this year.

So living with things to be not-thankful for like Trump pardoning that turkey Joe Arapio, backing an accused pedophile for Senate in the midst of national dopes-and-gropes sex scandals, apparently getting so cozy with Putin that they're practically life partners, and calling torch-bearing white nationalist/anti-Semites "very fine people" isn't the problem. It's discussing it that wrecks Thanksgiving.

Forget Thanksgiving. Hell, that's enough to even ruin Arbor Day.

It used to be so simple. We had Martha Stewart to blame for ruining Thanksgiving by making us feel like home-crafting losers for not inviting 90 relatives named Skip and Betsy to our newly refurbished barns for hand-slaughtered turkey and lawn bowling.

Now we've got this turkey in the room — and it's too big to ignore, too tough to digest and too poisonous to even discuss.